Hardware recommendations

brodie · 11 Jul 2008, 13:42

@bellwells said:

Looks like I'm the slow kid on the block with my 4 year old Sony Laptop, 1.73 Ghz, 1Gb, GeForce Go 6200, hardware and feedback turned on and AA at 4x.
The AA will make a huge difference, I'm amazed you have it turned on at all on your laptop. My lappie is coming up for 3 years old and I always have AA turned off- I can't afford the slow frame rate when working and as much as x 4 AA'd lines look lovely I much prefer the fine crisp aliased lines- I find them much easier to select. Of course I apply AA or resize in PS for presentation images and animations.

I'd be interested to see what your fps results would be if you go back and forth between x0 and x4 AA. I ran the script both ways and was shocked to find almost no difference at all (x4 was actually fasterbut probably well within
the margin of error).

-Brodie

plot-paris · 11 Jul 2008, 14:07

just tried it out with the city-model, scene 6 (more than 400.000 polygons).

the time-difference was 0,5 seconds at more than a minute duration.

that means the time improvement when switching from 4x anti-aliasing to 0x was only 0,7%.
the framerate was practically the same.

so it doesn't seem to make much difference, if anti-aliasing is switched on or off (strange, I believe to remember having switched off aa with a particulaly big model and getting much better framerates some months ago... )

richcat · 11 Jul 2008, 17:38

Tried the cube model on Dell Xeon dual 1.866Mhz core 2 quad with 4MB (basically giving 8 processors) - firms rendering machine.

Graphics card Quadro 3450/4000 sdi 256MB

Original cube - 14.3 fps

Select faster transparency quality - 21.1 fps

Turn off transparency - 41.6 fps

Jackson · 11 Jul 2008, 18:31

Really interesting to finally see some genuinely comparitive results from different setups. As much as I long for a quad or octo setup for rendering, it's amazing that 4gigs of RAM (you did mean 4Gb didn't you?) only produces 2.1 more fps than my measly 1.5Gb- perfect example of how imperative it is that SU should be able to multithread! I'm sure it helps in many other ways though- especially as I abuse my lappie ridiculously, it's rendering pretty much 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, while I'm modelling in SU 8 hrs a day and surfing in between. God I would love an octo core setup- oh those rendering times!

bellwells · 11 Jul 2008, 18:52

I turned off AA and the fps went up to 11.2; a significant increase from 5.5. I haven't tried the city block test.

Edit: I ran the city block test with AA off and scene 7 took 355 seconds at .2 fps. With AA 4x, it was 451 seconds and .16 fps (the script rounded up to .2; I just did the math for a more accurate reading). This is a 20% improvement.

bellwells · 11 Jul 2008, 19:12

@jackson said:

@bellwells said:

Looks like I'm the slow kid on the block with my 4 year old Sony Laptop, 1.73 Ghz, 1Gb, GeForce Go 6200, hardware and feedback turned on and AA at 4x.
The AA will make a huge difference, I'm amazed you have it turned on at all on your laptop. My lappie is coming up for 3 years old and I always have AA turned off- I can't afford the slow frame rate when working and as much as x 4 AA'd lines look lovely I much prefer the fine crisp aliased lines- I find them much easier to select. Of course I apply AA or resize in PS for presentation images and animations.

I probably should turn AA off when I model. However, the largest my models get is around 7 Mb. But even at that size, my laptop is a little sluggish sometimes. I have to admit, I never think to turn off AA.

brodie · 11 Jul 2008, 19:17

On the block model turning AA from x4 to x0 actually slowed down my fps? Something weird is going on that I haven't figured out yet. On the other hand turning the transparency quality to fast or off helped a ton.

-Brodie

richcat · 11 Jul 2008, 20:29

@jackson said:

it's amazing that 4gigs of RAM (you did mean 4Gb didn't you?) only produces 2.1 more fps than my measly 1.5Gb

Yes I did mean 4GB but it does not use all of it! Its terrible for sketchup, always locking up, freezing. I have tried different drivers, settings etc, with no luck, and so I use my sony vaio laptop that seems smoother and faster for modelling. As sketchup is single core application it only uses one 1.866MHz processor.

chango70 · 11 Jul 2008, 22:16

Just Did the Cube test

Results (Average over 5 tries with no shadow, no profiles and no AA):
14.6 frames/sec

Computer (laptop)

CPU: Intel Core2 Duo T9500 @ 2.6GHz
Ram: 4Gb @ 667 Mhz
GPU: Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT 512 MB

Wow this is fantastic! Will some one be able to compile the results? I would love to but unfortunately I have a deadline at my office until the 18th so i can't. I understand that GPU is making the main differences so maybe just compile a GPU table?

my 2 cents

I personally would kill to find out if the Nvidia Quadro FX card does perform better than the equivalent Geforce cards.

chango70 · 11 Jul 2008, 22:25

@plot-paris said:

this is true, after the discovery of this very useful command (Test.time_display) we dont need to have big models anymore. it is rather helpful to play with different style settings to find out how they influence the performance.
of course it still makes sense to have some scenes with different poly counts to check if the performance speed decreases proportional to the model complexity or if there are differences in hardware (for example that one crafic card is exactly the same speed as others with low poly but is much faster with hight poly)

anyway, my test results wit the city model:
(Core2Duo 3.00 GHz, 2 GB Ram, nVidia Quadro FX 1700)
(Hardware Acceleration, Fast Feedback, Anti Aliasing 4x)

Scene 1: 30.9 fps

Scene 7: 0.4 fps

and in Jackson's Cube model:

(17.1; 16.8) 16.8 fps

ps: nevertheless we should design a beautyful model that makes the whole process fun to watch. I think we first have to set up such a file, where we mind every factor that is important to know (textures, styles (like profiles), transparency (faster, nicer), low-/high-poly count, beauty ,...) and then we have to ask a ruby coder to write an automated script that runs the "Test.time_display" command, saves the result, proceeds to the next scene... finally displays all the gathered info in a window (like it does now after every test).
oh yes, is it possible to read out the hardware settings with ruby (or even the hardware components of the computer?)

Its slightly worrying to know that in the cube test the FX1700 only managed around 2 fps over my lowly (cheap) Geforce 8600M GT (14.5 fps with 4x AA)! I was just thinking of forking out £300 for for the FX. Now I am not so sure anymore. Does anyone have a FX3700 or a FX570 to compare?

bellwells · 12 Jul 2008, 00:23

@plot-paris said:

just to cheer you up...

my 5 year old laptop with a Celeron-processor and 1 gig ram achieved 1.7 frames with the cube test!

Jakob, looks like you and I are at the bottom of the barrel. My Sony has really been a workhorse for me over the years; can't complain too much.

rabbit · 13 Jul 2008, 11:20

The database of hardware that supports sketchup needs additional fields to cover it - For example, it matters not only which video card you have, but also what drivers. In my case, (a HP Pavilion laptop with a nvidia go 7600 card) the initial software was vista, but i have "downgraded" to xp. Since there are no updated drivers for this card that support xp, sketchup had all sorts of problems, and it wasn't till i managed to install updated drivers (174.93) via modded inf files (http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ ) that sketchup ran smoothly.

Running sketchup (and other cad / 3D programs that use opengl) on a laptop with nvidia cards can sometimes require additional tweaking.

cheers
rabbit

chango70 · 14 Jul 2008, 17:40

So... Do we have any initial results from the survey at all?

SketchUp Guide Tommy · 15 Jul 2008, 15:04

Hi Everyone,

Wow. I'm floored by the direction this post has gone. I think that creating a standardized test is great way to collect more objective feedback. If you're all cool with the idea, I'd like to launch version 2 of the survey which utilizes a particular model and the Ruby command "Test.time_display." We'd also like to gather more information about drivers, as rabbit recently mentioned, to further increase the relevance of the survey. Haha. I'm beside myself at the moment, I'm so excited

Anywho, back to the post that started this discussion. I created a gadget based on the results of my first survey. The content is hosted on the following page:

http://sketchuphelp.googlepages.com/hardwarereportresults

Enjoy!